February 14, 2008

The State of the Union speech has evolved into a pageant that includes a relatively new tradition of the president publicly acknowledging invited guests. These guests usually are props intended to endorse the president's policies.

So, in 2005 in defense of the Iraq invasion, President Bush drew the world's attention to Safia Taleb al-Suhail, the daughter of an Iraqi tribal leader killed by Saddam Hussein's intelligence forces for plotting a coup against Saddam.

When Safia held aloft for the cameras an ink-stained finger to indicate that she had voted in the Iraqi national elections engineered by the Bush administration, many in the chamber cheered wildly and wagged their fingers back in solidarity.

It was great political theater.

"Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country," a beaming President Bush said.

But on this day three years later, when millions of American women are contemplating cards, chocolates and flowers, women in Basra, Iraqi's second largest city, are under siege.

In Basra, five years after the U.S.-led invasion, women find themselves under the thumbs of religious fundamentalists who, in the absence of Saddam's iron-fisted secular rule, are killing them in front of their children. Some have been kidnapped, raped, strangled and beheaded, their limbs chopped off for purported violations of the Islamic faith. Women who under Saddam worked outside of their homes have been driven back inside, and if they dare to come out, wearing make-up or wearing a headscarf deemed too brightly colored, they very well could die.

"We don't know who to be afraid of," one Basra woman said in a CNN report. "Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don't know who to be afraid of."

Unfortunately, there's little to no protection.

In the CNN report, Basra's police chief flipped through a book of gruesome photos of dead women, believed to have been murdered for violating Islamic teachings.

"Attacks on the women of Basra intensified" after British forces withdrew to their bases and Iraqi security forces took over, the CNN report said.

What security? What security when the police chief frankly admitted that he doesn't have control over the thousands of police and others who've taken authority over women and girls in Basra.

Think about it. If Safia Taleb al-Suhail, who attended the State of the Union speech bare-headed and wearing make-up, had been in certain parts of Iraq, she could have been killed for being so bold.

During a White House ceremony in 2006, celebrating women's history month and international women's day, Laura Bush waxed eloquent about "encouraging signs of progress for women in many parts of the world," and she said, "I'm proud to be married to a man whose policies promote this success."

How tinny and empty that must sound to women back in U.S.-occupied Iraq, who believed removal of the dictator meant better days ahead.

In fact, one woman told CNN that for a time just after the U.S. invasion, the situation in Iraq was "the best," but now, "it's the worst."

"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights," she explained.

Last year, Madre, an international women's right's organization, released a scathing report on the status of Iraqi women since the U.S. invasion.

Most damning was Madre's allegation, in the words of the report's author, Yifat Susskind, that the United States "decisively traded women's rights for cooperation from the Islamists it has empowered."

So when we hear in this country the good news about the peace that has broken out in certain parts of Iraq, it's fair to ask, "At what price to women?"

Like much that has, or hasn't, happened since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it's embarrassing that, despite a huge investment of blood and treasure, some Iraqi women may be less free now than they were when Saddam was in charge.

Their sorry condition mocks America's Valentine Day's tradition of honoring women.

When Bush delivered his final State of the Union speech a few weeks back, there was no Taleb al-Suhail waving from the gallery to thunderous applause, and understandably so.

Betty Bayé's columns appear Thursdays in the Community Forum. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.">bbaye@courier-journal.com.">bbaye@courier-journal.com.